Crime

Perugia’s Prime Suspect

The Italian police may have had their reasons for holding 20-year-old American Amanda Knox in connection with the “extreme sex” murder last November of her British roommate, Meredith Kercher: her callous reaction, changing story, and unsettling MySpace page among them. What they don’t seem to have is a case. In Perugia, interviewing Knox’s parents, the prosecutor, and other sources close to the investigation, the author asks whether the American is really the evil temptress portrayed in the media, capable of inciting two young men to an unspeakably brutal crime.

The town of Perugia, with the house rented by Meredith Kercher and Amanda Knox in the foreground. The house came to be known as “The House of Horrors” in the weeks following the tragedy. From Rex Features.

In early September of last year, Amanda Knox, an American college student from the University of Washington, arrived in Perugia, Italy, and joined the ranks of the 40,000 students, Italian and foreign, who flock there annually. This is a mixed blessing for the majestic town of 160,000, which has endured a number of invasions through the ages: first, the Etruscans, who built their elaborate tombs there, followed by the Romans, Goths, and, much later, Napoleon. But nothing has ever hit Perugia quite like Amanda—or, more accurately, the unspeakable crimes for which she was arrested: inciting two men to commit a sexual assault so brutal that it left her British housemate dead—and, in the wake of this murder, the media and judicial circuses that now engulf her.

Amanda Knox with her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, only hours after Meredith’s body was discovered. From Rex Features.

When she arrived from Seattle, Amanda was just 20 years old and newly beautiful. Her heightened appeal had evidently come as a welcome surprise, a piece of luck she didn’t know quite how to handle. “Very short, kind of mousy brown hair” is how her high-school drama teacher recalls her. “Let’s lay it out: she wasn’t a dazzler.”

But by November, when she achieved international notoriety, she was perceived as irresistible—“Luciferina with the face of an angel,” as an Italian newspaper described her. Even before that—in the relatively anonymous first weeks of her Italian sojourn—she had been attracting attention from the locals. Her light, wide-spaced eyes are set in a finely boned face framed by sandy hair. Her firm, athletic body had grown slimmer and more seductive over the summer. Evenings, wearing a white miniskirt, Amanda strolled with boyfriends along the Corso Vannucci, a wide avenue of shops, cafés, and halls dedicated to the bankers and merchants who had made Perugia a Renaissance power. At the mouth of the avenue is an elaborate three-tiered fountain carved in white and pink stone.

Twice a week she worked at Le Chic, a dark, dank local bar, where, her exasperated Congolese boss, Diya Patrick Lumumba, recalls, “she spent most of her time chatting up the guys and flirting.”

Upon her arrival in town, Amanda had settled into a house on Via Pergola already occupied by three other women, also in their 20s. Two were Italian. The third, Meredith Kercher, was London-born, a reserved but popular University of Leeds student who hoped to become a teacher. In her work habits, Meredith was diligent and methodical. “Every night she came home like a good little girl and studied,” Amanda would later say.

Meredith had arrived in August under the auspices of the European Union’s Erasmus program, which promotes study abroad. After two months in Perugia, she had begun dating a young man—one of four Italian students who lived in the self-contained apartment underneath hers, next to a tiny garden of marijuana plants. (In Italy, where, as a Corriere della Sera journalist puts it, “everything is illegal and nothing forbidden,” this is a crime without consequences.)

The girls’ house overlooked the blue hills of Umbria, dotted with vineyards, green olive groves, and orange tiled roofs with ocher chimneys. Across the street from the house, next to the basketball courts and drug dealers of the Piazza Grimana, was a lovely large palazzo, with dramatic baroque windows. This was the site of the Università per Stranieri, the University for Foreigners, founded in 1925 under Benito Mussolini, where both Amanda and Meredith were enrolled.

Amanda loved just about everything in her new environment, as she wrote her friends and family. “I am actually at one of my most happiest places right now,” she reflected. Especially delightful, she thought, was the way all the shops shut down daily from around one to four in the afternoon. “Having that time in the middle of the day reminds you that life really isn’t all about going to work and making money. It’s about who you are and what you choose to do and who you choose to spend your time with,” she explained.

But the American girl was spending her time with far too many peculiar people, in the opinion of her three housemates, who didn’t appreciate running into these conquests at breakfast. Meredith seems to have been the most put off by Amanda’s active social life.

“Amanda arrived only a week ago and she already has a boyfriend,” Meredith dryly informed her father, John Kercher, a freelance journalist who often works for the daily Mirror. Actually, Meredith told her tight circle of British friends, Amanda had acquired several boyfriends in succession.

This was by no means Meredith’s only complaint. There are rumors of anger over the rent money, and she found Amanda sloppy about her personal habits. Meredith’s close friends also found Amanda a bit odd. “Amanda’s behavior always struck me as strange,” one of these friends would later tell police. “The first time I met her we were eating in a restaurant, when all of a sudden she began to sing in a loud voice. It was very strange and out of place.”

Amanda and Meredith did have a few things in common. Both were the offspring of divorced parents and both frequented some of the seedy local pubs that serve drinks until dawn. On some evenings, Meredith and Amanda liked to drop in on the four male students in the downstairs apartment, where, depending on the night, any number of guests could be found, strumming guitars or smoking marijuana. Among them: 20-year-old Rudy Guede, a tall, painfully skinny African man, born in the Ivory Coast. He would sometimes smoke pot until he passed out. Having spent his adolescence in Perugia, Rudy had been known as a good teenage basketball player, but one who lacked discipline. Most days he skipped school, preferring to play video games. Lately he’d fallen on hard times. On one occasion he was discovered by police with a knife in an abandoned house.

Guede first met Meredith in early October, in the downstairs apartment, and was instantly struck by the girl’s exotic beauty. “But you don’t have anything English about you,” Guede exclaimed, gazing at her cascade of shiny black hair and olive skin. “Well, that’s because of my parents,” he claims she replied. “I have mixed blood.” She was very close to her family, she told friends. In fact, she had been planning to go home within the next few weeks for “my mum’s birthday.”

Murder victim Meredith Kercher, in an undated photo she posted on her Facebook page. From Rex Features.

Later that same month, Amanda attracted a new admirer: 23-year-old Raffaele Sollecito, a computer-science student she met at a classical-music concert and slept with that very night. Tense and anxious, he always carried a penknife and smoked hashish and pot with great frequency. He was presumably not very popular with Amanda’s housemates. He would later observe that, whenever he showed up at the house on Via Pergola, Meredith appeared “quiet” and “exchanged few words” with him.

On November 1, All Saints’ Day, a religious holiday in Italy, Meredith spotted Raffaele and Amanda in the kitchen around four p.m. and went off without a word to the couple about her destination or plans. She joined some English friends for pizza and ice cream, then left at nine p.m., saying she was exhausted.

But that night, Meredith didn’t sleep.

Exactly what happened when she returned to the house on Via Pergola later that night is not clear. Rudy Guede’s DNA would be found all over her dead body the next day. His presence at the murder scene is one of the few firmly established facts of the case. There are others, but the Italian authorities have been led down an entirely different trail by the odd behavior of Amanda and Raffaele, whose actions have been too bizarre and callous to ignore, even if both are innocent.

A Lake of Blood

On the afternoon of November 2, police made a horrible discovery purely by happenstance. They had been trying to locate the owner of two cell phones that had been tossed into a neighboring garden—Meredith’s phones, it turned out—which led them to her house.

There they stumbled on Amanda and her boyfriend Raffaele, who seemed a little unsettled.

Amanda had returned to her house just a few hours earlier, Raffaele explained, after spending the night with him. She had found the bathroom she shared with Meredith smeared with so much blood it looked as though a butcher had attempted washing up and then given up the task. Amanda was puzzled. “It seemed a bit strange to me for the simple reason that all us girls are pretty clean and neat, and we clean up the bathroom,” she later reflected. Perhaps menstrual blood, she had thought with disgust. Or maybe someone in the house had hurt herself.

Amanda had also seen fecal matter floating in a toilet, police were told. The door to Meredith’s bedroom was locked, and there was a broken window in another bedroom. Amanda had tried three times to reach Meredith by cell phone, without success.

None of these ominous signs appears to have prompted the young couple to immediately phone the police, however. In fact, the American girl’s first response when she saw her blood-drenched bathroom, she explained to incredulous policemen, was to leave Via Pergola and return to Raffaele’s house to tell him the whole story over a leisurely breakfast. (Raffaele says he made two calls to the police shortly before the officers arrived. The police insist the calls were made after.)

The police broke open Meredith’s locked bedroom door. Inside they discovered the British girl’s half-naked corpse. She had been butchered. A panel of investigating judges would later write that she was surrounded by “un lago di sangue”—a lake of blood. A duvet was draped over her body. Around the dead girl’s neck was a bloody necklace of light stab wounds, inflicted, it was initially thought, in order to terrorize her into submitting to rape, both vaginal and anal.

Her throat had been slashed with a knife blow so powerful that it resulted in an eight-by-four-centimeter wound which completely severed a major artery. Meredith couldn’t scream for help, couldn’t move. Death by asphyxiation occurred agonizingly slowly on the evening of November 1. The approximate time of death, normally fairly easy to establish, was estimated and then, months later, re-estimated. The slaughter was the work, the judges who read the autopsy report determined, of “one or more pitiless aggressors” who knew her. “La povera Meredith,” the judges call her in their confidential 35-page report. Poor Meredith.

Almost instantly news of the brutal murder of an unnamed British girl appeared on Sky TV. From his home, in Surrey, John Kercher tried his daughter’s cell phone 15 to 20 times, in vain. There were only 700 British students studying in Italy under the Erasmus program. Panicked, he called the Mirror for help. It was 10 p.m. when someone on the night desk told him his child was dead.

“I can’t even cry I’m so in shock,” said Kercher. “Nothing can prepare you for the news we received,” added his older daughter, Stephanie. Her sister, she said, “was one of the most beautiful, intelligent, witty, and caring people you could wish to meet.” Those were their last public words.

A Bizarre Shopping Trip

The next day, Amanda and Raffaele went shopping at Bubble, a fashionable clothing store on Via Calderini. In its brightly lit window were an assortment of flashy skirts and shoes. There the couple purchased two pairs of thong underwear, at which point Carlo Scotto di Rinaldi, the store’s bi-lingual owner, tells me, they kissed and embraced, and Raffaele told Amanda, “ ‘We can have wild sex tonight!’ Sesso selvaggio.” As Amanda was only his second girlfriend, Raffaele was pretty new to sex in all of its forms, according to his voluble lawyer, Marco Brusco. “Selvaggio, he learned from her,” the lawyer says, raising his hands, while speculating on the number of Amanda’s previous lovers, which he believes to be unnaturally high. What can you expect? “È americana!”

All of the couple’s amorous behavior was caught on closed-circuit camera. The shop owner, taken aback when he recognized Amanda’s face on the local news, mentioned what he had seen to a friend on the police force. A few days later, police retrieved the tape and handed it over to Perugia’s deceptively mild prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini, whose position is roughly equivalent to that of a U.S. district attorney. Within days, the tape was released to the rest of the world. On television and Web sites everywhere, the couple’s passion over the thong underwear was played and replayed.

After that, nothing was ever the same. Amanda Knox was guilty in the eyes of the world. The couple’s cell phones were secretly tapped, on orders from Mignini. Their private conversations and police interviews were transcribed and translated from English to Italian. Copies of some of these documents, approximately 250 pages in all, were given to me by Italian sources, many of whom are suspicious of Amanda. They are mystified by her callous self-absorption and apparent imperviousness to the horror of her housemate’s murder. How could such an insensitive young woman, officials wondered, possibly be innocent?

Foxy Knoxy

Amanda grew up in her mother’s modest, pale-yellow house in West Seattle. It is a working-class neighborhood crammed with car-repair shops and houses the size of fishing shacks. The neighborhood is about 15 miles from Seattle Prep, a highly competitive Jesuit school filled with the children of wealthy Catholics. Amanda had her heart set on going there, and was given a partial scholarship.

“Yeah, there were a lot of rich kids.” Amanda’s mother, Edda Mellas, acknowledges, “You know, she found her niche, but that was definitely not her social network at all.”

Amanda found other ways of inviting attention. She tried out for all the plays, with mixed results: she played an orphan in Annie her sophomore year, the third Von Trapp kid in The Sound of Music her junior year. One of her best friends from high school, Sean Glenn, recalls that the two of them “always used to sing everywhere, in the halls, and people were really annoyed by it.”

This imperviousness to the judgments of others persisted through the years. Amanda always had an air, Glenn says, of general ditsiness. “She’s not crazy and she’s not stupid,” he says. However, “she phrases things as though she doesn’t have a full grasp of reality.” He noticed that “her thoughts get muddled,” and he found her “vulnerable to confusion.”

She had, on the other hand, undeniable abilities. Her grades were good enough for her to make the dean’s list, and she was a fine soccer player. The nickname Foxy Knoxy, which the international press has made much of, was originally acquired on the soccer field—a reference to her sly way of cozying up to the ball. But by her junior year of college, she had posted the name FoxyKnoxy on her MySpace page above a provocative photo of herself in a minidress, fondling a Gatling gun.

Also on MySpace, she posted an utterly unrealistic short story about a rape (“For a second Edgar thought he was going to say something, but he felt the tightness of his brow ease and he swallowed a large, slippery gulp of aching, burning rage … “). This passage has been treated by the press as a blueprint for crime.

An Object of Suspicion

On Sunday, November 4, a day after the infamous shopping trip, and two days after Meredith was discovered with her throat slashed, the couple found themselves in the waiting room of a police station. Amanda was agitated. Raffaele tried to improve her mood. After stepping out for pizza, he regaled her with translations of such Italian vulgarisms as “Vaffanculo” (Fuck off) and “Li mortacci tua” (Screw your lousy ancestors). They both laughed a good deal. Not the behavior one would expect from friends devastated by a housemate’s murder, felt local law enforcement.

On another occasion, Amanda described the crime scene in especially blunt terms to those waiting at the station. She had found “shit in the bathroom,” she told Meredith’s friends, using the word over and over again in a loud voice. She also talked on her cell phone to friends about her growing impatience with the police. “If they ask me to stay on over Christmas, I’m going to ask someone for help.… I can’t stay at their beck and call forever,” she said.

Some who encountered her in the days following the murder were aghast at her behavior. “Amanda was as cool as anything and completely emotionless,” Giacomo Silenzi, the dead girl’s romantic interest, told the Daily Mail. He started wondering “if she could have been involved.”

Despite her general obliviousness, even Amanda was beginning to get an inkling that she had become an object of suspicion. At the police station, when she spoke about discovering Meredith’s body, her listeners found her manner disconcerting. “I was the only one who was with her—that’s why they’re squeezing my brain, trying to make me say something,” she was overheard complaining. “They treat me like a criminal,” she told another friend.

Prosecutor Mignini especially was beginning to consider Amanda a suspect, although for days he patiently bided his time, simply listening to her private conversations. From Robyn Butterworth, one of Meredith’s closest friends in Perugia, he learned that, just hours after the girl’s mutilated corpse was discovered, Amanda was boasting about “having seen Meredith’s body by the closet with a cover or a sheet over her.” Butterworth got the feeling that Amanda “seemed proud to have been the first to have found her.”

How could Amanda have known such vital details? Mignini wondered. The door to Meredith’s bedroom had been locked when police arrived. It had been forced open by police, but then quickly closed. If Amanda had seen the corpse of her housemate, Mignini decided, it could mean only one thing: she had watched Meredith die.

It didn’t take much for Mignini to persuade a panel of judges to see things his way. Despite the lack of clarity on an assortment of vital issues—how many attackers were involved in the supposed orgiastic frenzy, the identities of these criminals, and whether there actually was a rape at all—in their report, the judges are pretty certain about whom they consider the most dangerous aggressor: Amanda. A histrionic girl who makes scenes, as the judges described her, “Amanda … never showed any visible grief for the tragic loss of her friend, but rather indulged in ostentatious displays of affection with Raffaele, even going as far as the paradoxical purchase of an item of intimate apparel, apparently for use in having ‘wild sex.’ ” Equally repellent to the judges: “Amanda … is a restless person who does not disdain multiple frequentations.” In other words, she sleeps around.

From the start, the Italian authorities, after reviewing the American girl’s inappropriate responses to tragedy and her vulnerability to suggestion, believed she was an impassive villainess straight out of a Hitchcock film, heartless and indubitably guilty.

None of this was backed up by the evidence.

Four days after Meredith’s body was found, Amanda’s mother was on her way to Perugia to comfort her daughter. Amanda, she assumed, had been deeply traumatized by her housemate’s murder. “The House of Horrors,” as the crime scene was dubbed by the tabloids, had been cordoned off by police.

Mellas, a math teacher in Seattle, is a small woman with a tired face and an air of perpetual bafflement. She is of the firm conviction that, as she puts it, “all the girls in the house got along great!” She speaks no Italian. She cannot begin to understand what is happening, or why.

She was wearily switching planes in the Zurich airport when her cell phone rang. The caller was her husband, Chris, Amanda’s stepfather. “They’ve arrested three people in the murder. One of them is Amanda,” he said. Another, as it turned out, was Amanda’s newest boyfriend, Raffaele, about whom Edda knew very little, except that according to Amanda he “was a nice, quiet guy.”

“I was a mess, an absolute mess,” Edda tells me. “I was wandering the airport, waiting for my flight to Rome, thinking, This can’t be!” She arrived in Perugia, she says, to find “hundreds of reporters” chasing her down the beautiful brick-lined streets—American-TV cameramen, Italians, British reporters, some actually grabbing her arm in a bid to obtain an impromptu on-air exclusive.

“It was like the Roman army was coming at you,” says Amanda’s father, Curt Knox. He is a Macy’s vice president, also based in Seattle. Amanda is the older by a year of the two daughters he had with Edda. The couple have been divorced for more than 16 years, but are now presenting what they call “a united front,” speaking to few journalists, only American.

Upon her arrival in Perugia, Amanda’s mother was quickly taken in hand by Daniella Borghesi, who works for the mayor. She introduced Edda to a local lawyer, Luciano Ghirga, and translated for her. She also told Edda how to find the best place to buy bread, where to get a cell phone at the lowest price, and, above all, how to duck into the narrow alleys that crisscross the town to avoid journalists. What she never translated for Edda was the media coverage of Amanda. “Una cacciatrice di uomini“—a man-hunter—is how the newspaper Corriere della Sera described the American girl. Her trajectory was neatly summed up by another Perugia newspaper: “From brilliant student to cold man-eater.” She was the predatory American woman—every European’s nightmare.

All around the world, Amanda began to assume an almost mythical identity: she was Circe to Raffaele’s Ulysses, an inveigler of damaged men. The wife of Meredith’s family’s lawyer explains that in Italy it is generally assumed that, in Amanda’s clever hands, her pot-smoking Raffaele was putty. “Rigirato come un calzino,” she explains, making a little twisting motion—turned inside out, like a sock, by the American temptress with the guileless face.

An Ever Changing Story

Eventually, Edda was allowed to see her daughter in the newly constructed dun-colored prison in Capanne, just outside Perugia, where Amanda, Raffaele, and Rudy Guede were all being held. (Rudy and Raffaele have since been moved to other prisons.) And once again Mignini ordered that Amanda’s conversations be taped and then translated into Italian.

Amanda told her mother she had no idea what could have possibly induced the authorities to put her in prison. “It’s just not fair,” she said. She was in jail only because, as she explained, “someone else who had nothing else to do” had killed Meredith.

The problem was she kept changing her story. She recounted a mutating version of events and of who the killer might be. No lawyer was present at the questioning, and Amanda told her parents that she was informed that if she requested one “it would just make things worse.” Most awful of all, Amanda would say, the cops screamed at her whenever she said she was innocent. She was a liar, they said. She would go to jail.

In one of these grillings, which concluded at 1:45 a.m., she pointed the finger at the bar owner Patrick Lumumba, who had criticized her work habits. “I recall in a confused way that he killed her” were her words. She couldn’t be more precise, Amanda said, because she’d smoked a joint that afternoon. During another interrogation session—it was around 5:45 a.m. by that time—Amanda added some details to the story. “I think I was in the kitchen At a certain point I heard Meredith’s screams and I was afraid and I covered my ears.”

Lumumba is a calm, soft-spoken man who is as puzzled as anyone by the turn of events. His DNA was never found at the crime scene. He had a firm alibi and witnesses. After 14 days in jail, he was set free. In other words, Amanda apparently created a completely fictional account to implicate him, and owing to the peculiarities of the Italian judicial system, despite his release he is still a suspect. While the investigation continues, Lumumba explains, he cannot reopen his bar.

“Why did she do it?” Lumumba echoes when we meet. “To derail the investigation by pointing the finger at me.”

Soon after falsely accusing her employer, Amanda more or less retracted her statement. This time she claimed that she’d been slapped around by police and threatened with 30 years’ imprisonment. She was, she insisted, still “very confused.” Was she at home in her kitchen when Meredith was murdered or not? She had absolutely no idea. All she could say was “I did not kill Meredith. That’s for sure!”

Simultaneously, in a separate room, Raffaele, too, was questioned by police. Like Amanda’s, his version of events seemed to change whenever things got rough. And judging by his second interrogation, which lasted from 10 one night till 4 the next morning, the grilling was pretty exhausting.

On the night of Meredith’s murder, he told police in this new version, he was working on his computer at home, smoking marijuana. Starting at around eight, he and Amanda were apart for five hours: she headed off to Lumumba’s bar, and he went home alone. Whatever he had told police initially—namely that Amanda had been by his side the whole of that fatal night—was “a sack of bullshit.” His girlfriend had pressured him to lie.

However, just days later, this damning account also was retracted. Now that he had had time to mull things over, Raffaele said, he couldn’t remember much at all about the night Meredith was killed—not whether Amanda was with him at home the entire evening or whether she actually went out.

“Because there was so much grass, so much alcohol, he just couldn’t remember,” Raffaele’s lawyer offers helpfully. Only hashish and marijuana, he adds.

Why does your client smoke so much marijuana that his memory fails him at the most critical moments, I ask Brusco.

“Perchè è coglione“—Because he’s an asshole—comes the reply.

But the lawyer knows as well as anyone that these conflicting accounts were devastating for the cases of both Amanda and Raffaele. Francesco Maresca, who is representing Meredith’s family, tells me that, in Italy, “the accused has the right to lie, but even if you lie, you have to stick to your story—not give out five stories.” The lawyer figures one day soon Mignini is going to put the two in the same room, grill them, and see which one crumbles first. “Slowly the circle is closing,” says Maresca.

Suspect Rudy Guede arriving at Rome’s Fiumicino airport, December 6, 2007, after being extradited from Germany. His DNA was found all over the crime scene. By Tiziani Fabi/AFP/Getty Images.

“I never want to see Amanda again,” Raffaele has told police. His father, Francesco Sollecito, a prominent urologist from Bari, in southern Italy, is particularly agitated on the subject of the young American girl’s pernicious influence on his only son.

“She is a strange girl. I think we can agree on that,” he says. “I have my doubts about her truthfulness. What happened the night of the murder? Every time she talks a different truth comes out of her mouth. There are so many truths and versions of the truth that it is hard to know what she is saying!”

“Don’t Leave Me”

And sure enough, at the end of November, yet another amazing version of the truth about who murdered Meredith was unveiled—only this time courtesy of the Italian authorities. Rudy Guede, the skinny pot smoker from the Ivory Coast who occasionally dropped by the apartment underneath Amanda’s, was arrested on a train in Germany, where he had fled.

When captured, Guede acknowledged having been in Meredith’s house the night she died, but only, he insisted, because he had been invited over. He claims they engaged in consensual foreplay. This portion of his testimony appears open to doubt. (“The walls of the vagina weren’t lubricated,” Maresca tells me. “Therefore, it seems there wasn’t any desire on her part. Or participation.”)

Rudy made other dubious statements. At the moment when the murderer cut the British girl’s throat, he maintains, he was not by her side. He was, he said, on the toilet with a bad stomachache. Someone else—an Italian man Rudy only barely glimpsed and could not identify—had killed Meredith, he added. When he emerged from the bathroom, he watched the British girl dying. “I have never seen so much blood in my life,” he told Mignini and the presiding judge.

But Rudy did leave. He left the door to Meredith’s bedroom open, he says. He left the door to the house only half closed. He walked through the little gate toward Piazza Grimana. He went home and washed his hands and changed his clothes, he recalls. “I couldn’t bear to stay in the house where there was still this nauseating smell of blood.” So he went with a friend to a popular student disco called Domus, where he stayed until 2:30 a.m., and then moved on to a pub, where he lingered until 5 a.m.

The next night—by which time Meredith’s murder was all over the news—he went dancing. Around 2 a.m., when the D.J. called for a moment of silence for the poor dead girl, Rudy alone kept moving his hips, according to three witnesses. A few hours later he hopped a train to Germany.

His DNA was found not only all over the British girl’s body but also in his bloody fingerprint staining one of her cushions and on the straps of the bra she wore the night of her death. There is little doubt that he had intimate contact with Meredith the night she died.

But to complicate matters, a forensics team took a second look around the House of Horrors in January; this time they discovered a clasp that had been cut off the same bra. On that clasp they found Raffaele’s DNA.

Soon the Italian officials came up with a theory that Amanda wielded such enormous power over Rudy and Raffaele that she could order them both to violate and murder her housemate. “Certainly Rudy initiated the attack, and then because Meredith resisted the sexual violence, perhaps all of them were involved together. Or maybe after 20 seconds Amanda intervened—she is in love with Rudy,” says Maresca, who is on very good terms with the prosecutor and speaks to him and his staff. “In any event, it’s homicide for all three!”

Raffaele and Rudy insist they have never met. In fact, Rudy, during the course of his lengthy interrogation, made it apparent he barely knew the American girl at all. His friends, he points out, considered her una troia—a bitch.

Giuliano Mignini is a pale, unsmiling man of some girth who bears a resemblance to the character actor Vincent Gardenia. Wearing a tight black suit, he greets me with grave courtesy in his small, sunless office. A wooden cross is nailed to the wall above his desk.

Do you think perhaps something is emotionally awry with Amanda Knox—narcissism perhaps—and that that may be her real problem? I ask.

Mignini’s eyes give nothing away. After a long silence, he replies: “Signora, I cannot answer that question. But you see that large cabinet over there?” He points to a massive gray aluminum cabinet that reaches the ceiling. “It is packed with files and information. And it is locked.”

But I notice that, buried toward the end of their 35-page decision to keep Amanda in jail before trial, the judges, taking their cue from the prosecutor, claim the American girl has “una multiforme personalità“—a multifaceted personality, “composed of both self-possession and cunning … and a heightened—one might say fatal—capacity for manipulation.” To permit such a girl the privileges of freedom before trial, or even house arrest, say the judges, would be tantamount to giving her license to influence co-defendants.

In December, when the decision to keep Amanda in jail until trial came down, Mignini was so thrilled he actually embraced the lawyer for Meredith’s family. “It was a home run,” Maresca tells me, contented. “It meant all the evidence was good.”

That same month, Mignini grilled Amanda again and again about a kitchen knife thought to be the murder weapon. It had been found in Raffaele’s house. On its blade was Meredith’s DNA; near the handle, Amanda’s. A sure sign, the prosecutor thought, that Amanda had handled the weapon that killed the girl. What accounted for those two different DNA sources?, the prosecutor demanded.

“I don’t know! I can’t understand!” Amanda replied, in an interrogation punctuated with violent sobs, during which she eventually exercised her right not to speak.

And, as Amanda informed her parents during a jail visit, she has no idea how that large knife managed to migrate from her own kitchen to her boyfriend’s house. But three legal sources in Perugia (two unfriendly to Amanda) tell me the injuries sustained by Meredith were inconsistent with the blade of that knife.

As for the DNA, Amanda’s lawyer, Ghirga, who speaks to almost no journalists, tells me, “We are saying it is only a tiny little bit of biological material on the knife—and both girls lived in the same house!”

The Question of Rape

The rumor in Perugia is that the forensics and postmortem examination of Meredith’s murder was a hasty and perhaps botched job. The time of death is not the only uncertainty. An Italian TV station recently revealed that some of the evidence (including Meredith’s bra) had deteriorated and grown so soiled as to be valueless. The question of rape, initially suggested by such signs as unexplained anal dilation, was months later reviewed by the medical examiner Luca Lalli. On the one hand, Lalli declared in late February, Meredith’s body had sustained no bruising that unequivocally indicates sexual assault. On the other, he continued, it was evident that sexual activity had occurred, possibly “under threat of violence.” Within two days of these remarks, Mignini fired his coroner. By mid-April, no one seemed to know very much about what Meredith had endured in her last tragic hours. Yes, there’d been some sexual activity, a new coroner’s report declared, but “it was impossible to tell whether it was consensual or not.”

And in the same month, Rudy revised his earlier testimony and told the prosecutor that, on reflection, he not only saw Raffaele at the House of Horrors the night Meredith died, but that “I also saw Amanda Knox. She was at the door.”

In other words, the case is not going well. All anyone knows is that a girl who has been charged with nothing and is very likely innocent of murder will be languishing in an Italian jail for at least the next nine months, if not 30 years.

The Italian legal system, ecclesiastical judge Count Neri Capponi informs me, will not work in Amanda’s favor. “Our system stems from the Inquisition and also from medieval law,” he explains. What this means, in effect, he says, is that justice in Italy “is based on the supremacy of the prosecution. This nullifies the fact—written in our constitution by the way—that you’re innocent until proven guilty.”

Amanda’s cell is furnished with four beds, a desk, a TV, a kitchenette, and a bucket where the prisoners do their laundry. Her fellow prisoners are women of experience. One of her cellmates asks her, “What on earth were you thinking of, trusting a boyfriend who carried a knife?”

On their visits to the jail, Curt and Edda repeat their lawyer’s advice to Amanda. Speak to no one. Stay calm. Don’t look at the evening news. It’s full of invented stuff, says Edda, designed to break you down.

She gets thousands of letters from admirers, Amanda informs her parents, many from prisoners all over Italy. And she really appreciates these letters, the girl adds, because they’re very supportive. And one of these prisoners even said he’d seen her picture on TV and found her so “hot” that he sent her “a sexual kiss.”

Also, Amanda adds, her own lawyer told her that Raffaele’s attorneys have suggested that it might be a great idea for the two young people to re-unite in the same room to speak to a judge together.

“Basically you two could both return to your original story,” says her mother. “Before they started hitting you, and all the rest of it.”

“Yes, and when they said I would be going to jail for 30 years, and I really didn’t know what would happen!” says Amanda.

The prison psychiatrist came to see her, to ask how she was doing.

“I’ll tell you,” said Amanda. “I’m stuck in jail.”

She had thought by now she would be released. She is always chilly. And lonely. “They bring your food to your cell. You do not go to a cafeteria,” says Curt. “So she’s in her cell 23 out of 24 hours a day. She’s allowed one hour out in the yard for exercise.” But the American must exercise alone, away from other prisoners, says the warden. She is small. She is young. “They want to make sure,” her mother explains, “she’s not bothered by hardened criminals.”

On Good Friday, a local bishop of Umbria visited the prison, as is his custom. Kneeling, he washed Amanda’s feet. Then he kissed them.